


i never needed any proof to trust the heart that beats inside of you

by jemmasimmmons



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Memory Loss, Mentions of Death, Mild Injury, Reincarnation AU, possible triggers for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-19 10:45:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4743404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jemmasimmmons/pseuds/jemmasimmmons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Maybe, Jemma thinks, if she has found the right theory when she tells him in this life then he will remember it in the next."</p><p>Another reincarnation AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i never needed any proof to trust the heart that beats inside of you

**Author's Note:**

> My last reincarnation AU that I wrote a few months ago was one of my most favourite things I have ever written, so when inspiration struck for another one I decided just to roll with it. There was no prompt for this one, it just came from my own head!
> 
> I've rated this as mature because of some implications, nothing explicit, but I'm pretty new at this so I just want to be careful!
> 
> The title of this fic comes from the Sleeping at Last song 'We're Still Here' which is pretty much the anthem for the story, so you may want to look it up after reading. Credit for the poem at the beginning goes to http://absentions.net/, her stuff is beautiful, you should go check it out!
> 
> I hope you enjoy this!

_“I hope_

_that if alternate universes exist,_

_it will still be you_

_and me_

_in the end. I hope that_

_there will always be an us._

_In every world,_

_in every story.”_

(Tina Tran, ‘Let us always find each other’)

ninety nine (part i)

 

The sun is hot on the back of her neck as she pushes her palm against the scorching paint of the gate, her neatly polished black pumps scuffing the pebbles in her way to the side, in an oddly adult gesture for such a small girl.

The park is a hive, full to bursting with scuff-kneed, suntanned children, all of whom have been hustled out of their houses by parents exasperated with their giddy, summer-addled behaviour after almost six weeks of holiday. In a few days, school will be starting again to occupy them, but for now the children have managed to converge to the park in the natural, restless way that only children can.

As she walks through the park, she sees kids climbing up the slide the wrong way only to meet their shrieking friends coming up the right way at the crest of the slide. Others are swinging, kicking their feet up to make themselves go higher and yelling with the pure joy of it, while another cluster are wrapping themselves around the climbing frame like grapes on a vine.

But these children are not who she is looking for.

The one she _is_ looking for is behind them all, huddled at the base of the baby seesaw on the far side of the park with a magnifying glass held firmly in his fist and a frown furrowed on her forehead.

Her feet start moving towards him without her even thinking about it.

It is late August.

She is four years old.

Which means that he is five.

She comes to a halt on his left, and when her shadow falls across his magnifying glass blocking out his light he looks up at her warily, the kind of wariness of a boy who has been warned just as many times as she has on the dangers of being approached by strangers.

She smiles at him.

‘Hello.’

He doesn’t smile back and his eyes darken with a deeper wariness, like he has learnt to be even more wary of little girls than of strangers.

‘Hello.’

She nods down towards him. ‘What’s your name?’

 

(As if she doesn’t know it already. As if, even at four years old, she didn’t know that it was the only thing still keeping her tethered to the earth.)

 

(That’s quite a strange thought, when you’re four years old.)

 

‘Leopold.’

‘Should I call you that then?’

She cocks her head and rubs the toe of her shoe into the dirt, in an attempt at playing inconspicuous, when really her heart is pounding so hard against the inside of her chest it feels like it should belong to someone far bigger than her, that it’s too large for her to hold up on her own.

She avoids his eyes and the increasingly suspicious expression she knows must be written across his face.

‘No.’

‘Well, what should I call you then?’

‘Fitz.’

When she nods and smiles ( _of_ course _that’s what I call you_ ), it is with a sigh of such immense relief that she is certain he will notice.

Luckily, Fitz has already returned to the mechanics of the seesaw, angling his back away from her so he can shed some light on his project again. There is something about the finality of the gesture and his innate stubbornness that she knows all too well, that strikes a note of doubt inside her and makes her falter, hanging back on one leg and chewing nervously at her lip.

But then his hand comes up to scratch the back of his neck, letting her see that his nails are chipped and covered in dirt, and a feeling passes through her body that even at just four years old Jemma Simmons understands perfectly.

Taking a deep breath, she ducks down under the play equipment to pop up on his other side and press her weight against the arm of the seesaw, so it dipped.

‘I’m Jemma.’

‘Oh.’ He swallows, looking hesitantly up at her, hanging over the metal of the seesaw and swinging her legs off the ground. ‘I’m Fitz.’

‘I know.’

 

( _More than you think I do_.)

 

‘You just said.’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ He glances back to the ground. ‘I suppose I did.’

And then he looks up at her again and grins.

It is a grin that Jemma has seen in every lifetime she has ever lived, a grin that lifts the corners of his mouth and lights up his eyes without really meaning to. It is a grin that automatically makes Jemma’s mouth want to copy it, and even now she can feel the familiar tug to raise her lips into a smile at him.

It is a grin that she _knows_.

She is four years old and met this boy less than five minutes ago, but already she knows his smile in ways she cannot understand, or put into words. Not yet, anyway.

It has been ninety-eight lifetimes, and it still amazes her every single time.

‘Can I sit with you?’

Fitz blinks, startled, and Jemma holds her breath as she watches him deliberate in that utterly transparent way he always does: tongue sticking part way out of his mouth, eyes squinted up towards the sun and his nose wrinkled.

When his shoulders slump and he nods begrudgingly at her, Jemma feels the fist around her heart release.

‘I suppose so,’ Fitz says but as she crouches to the ground with him, he narrows his eyes at her. ‘Just don’t touch my magnifying glass, okay?’

Jemma nods; it seems a small price to pay, even if he has a very nice magnifying glass.

She tucks her arms around her knees and rests her head there, watching him work. There is a smudge of soil just above his ear and she can’t help smiling at that. Fitz looks up at her and catches her look.

‘Why are you smiling?’ he asks, and she can tell that he’s trying to be serious about it, but the corners of his mouth are twitching.

‘No reason,’ she says. ‘I just think we’re going to be good friends, that’s all.’

Fitz’s face falls back down to the ground, his cheeks rosy. ‘I don’t make friends with girls,’ he declares.

But then, after a moment: ‘You can use my magnifying glass next, if you like.’

The smile returns to Jemma’s face and she sits back on her heels in the dirt next to him, and she waits.

She waits for him to fall in love with her again.

 

two

 

She first sees him through the flaps of two tents, bent over a pail of cold water and splashing his face in the pale light of dawn.

Jemma’s hands go slack inside her sleeves and she finds her breath catching in her throat as she watches him shiver against the cold and bring his arm up to wipe at a few droplets still clinging to his hair.

 _You’re here_ , she thinks, and like the click of a cart wheel suddenly all her dreams make sense.

 _You’re real_.

It is only when her feet begin to slip in the ankle thick mud on the ground that she manages to force herself towards him, staggering slightly in her amazement.

‘Fitz,’ she breathes, and he looks up at her with a start.

Jemma manages to stumble forward enough to throw her arms around his neck, burying her face into the heavy leather of his jacket to hide her delighted grin.

 _You’re real_.

She tries to hold back a bubble of laughter; she isn’t crazy, this proves it! All the dreams she has had ever since she was a little girl, all the memories of a different time, a different life, they weren’t the ravings of a lunatic.

They were _real_.

Her elation doesn’t last long however, as Fitz draws sharply back from her embrace almost as soon as she has jumped at him, sucking in a quick breath of air as he does so.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he hisses, and Jemma recoils slightly at the venom in his tone.

‘Fitz,’ she says again, but more hesitantly this time. How could she possibly explain to him what had drawn her to the enemy camp? What words were there for that feeling of uncertain attraction she had felt, like a moth drawn to a flame without knowing they are about to be burnt? ‘I…’

There is a snap from behind them, and Fitz leaps about a foot into the air before slamming his palm over her mouth and grabbing her by the elbow. He forces them both to the ground behind a tent, concealing them from whoever has come to use the water bowl next.

Jemma tenses up as he touches her, feeling the rough callouses of his hand against her cheek and the smell of the leather on his skin. It is all so hauntingly familiar, and yet something she has never experienced before. Not in this life, anyway.

Fitz keeps his hand firmly pressed over her mouth, his head turned away from her. He is breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling rapidly like he is having trouble catching his breath. Once Jemma realises she is watching it maybe a little too attentively, she quickly flicks her gaze to the floor.

When the footsteps finally begin to squelch away from the water, Fitz slowly turns to face her again and his grip eases on her mouth but not on her arm. He licks his lips nervously.

‘How do you know my name?’ he asks in a low whisper.

Jemma feels her heart skip a beat.

 _Oh no_.

‘What?’

‘I said, how do you know my name? My family name, anyway.’

His words are fading out to be replaced by an awful buzzing in Jemma’s ears as her mouth hovers half open, unable to form the words she is too afraid to say.

_Oh, please. Please, no._

‘I…’

Suddenly, Fitz’s eyes narrow.

‘Are you a spy?’ he demands. ‘Is that it?’ He swears under his breath. ‘Bloody hell, I knew the English were low, but I never thought they’d stoop _this_ low…a girl for a spy…’

Jemma finds that her body is no longer able to hold her up and she has to sink back against the tent, hot, furious tears prickling at her eyes. She stares at Fitz as he continues his bitter mutterings, as if she wasn’t even there.

 _You don’t remember me_.

‘And in any case,’ Fitz is saying, looking sideways at her with a scowl, ‘there’s no need for spies anymore, is there? Not now.’

Jemma blinks furiously to clear her tears; for some reason she doesn’t want him to see her cry.

‘What?’ When she speaks, her voice is gravelly. ‘What do you mean?’

Fitz looks at her in surprise. ‘You really don’t know?’ When she shakes her head slightly, he sighs, and hits his fist against his knee. ‘Our king’s dead, killed in the battle on Flodden field. Everything you see here, it’s going to be gone in a few hours. We’re retreating.’ He glares at her, his eyes suddenly bright with anger. ‘So you can take _that_ back and tell your-‘

‘I’m not a spy,’ Jemma says quickly.

Fitz frowns at her suspiciously. ‘No?’

Jemma shakes her head. ‘No. I promise.’

He looks at her closely for a moment and Jemma cannot help the flurry of prayers spinning in her brain, the bargains she is prepared to make.

_Please let him remember me, I’ll do anything at all, just please…_

_Let him remember me._

‘Well in any case,’ Fitz says eventually, and all of Jemma’s hopes begin to die. ‘You shouldn’t be here. Nobody’s in so great a mood, and if somebody found you…’ He breaks off abruptly, and Jemma watches the animosity in his eyes soften ever so slightly. ‘Well, they just wouldn’t be very nice, is all.’

Jemma has heard all the rumours about what men on campaign did to the girls they found in their camps, and although the thought of that makes her shudder, she can’t find the strength in her arms to get up and leave him.

Not again.

‘You should leave,’ Fitz says firmly, and taking hold of her elbow again, he heaves them both to their feet, still sliding in the mud around them.

A flare of panic rises in Jemma’s chest and she has the uncontainable urge to latch onto his jacket, to not let go.

_Please don’t leave me._

_Not again_.

‘But…’ She opens her mouth to protest, then gasps as she sees a small dark patch starting to grow underneath his armpit. ‘You’re bleeding!’

Fitz follows her gaze in surprise, as if he had forgotten all about his wound, and hisses out through his teeth. ‘Ah. Damn it, no time to change the bandages before we leave.’

‘How long has it been bleeding?’ Jemma asks, her voice raising a few octaves. ‘I mean- when did you get…hurt?’ She has to gasp the word out the thought is so abhorrent to her.

Fitz is staring at her again, seemingly bewildered by how affected she is. ‘About a week ago,’ he stammers. ‘An arrow just…grazed my side. It’s not bleeding as much anymore, though.’

‘But it shouldn’t be bleeding at all!’

Moving forward, Jemma presses two of her fingers into his side where the bleeding is and winces when she feels him flinch. She glances up at him and, for the first time, she notices how pale he is and that there is a thin sheen of sweat on his upper lip.

Inside of her, something tightens.

‘It might go rotten,’ she says, trying to keep her voice even so as not to startle him.

It doesn’t work; Fitz’s head immediately swings down towards hers so they are pressed forehead

to forehead.

‘ _Rotten?!_ ’

For the first time, Jemma can hear vulnerability in the way his voice shakes with the word, and it made him seem a lot younger.

‘It’s a possibility. Your blood…it might be poisoned.’ She realises that she still had her palm held over his side and that her hair is still lightly brushing his chin, and she swallows. ‘I certainly wouldn’t advise travelling, not like this.’

Fitz groans and pulls back from her. Almost instantly, Jemma misses him being close to her.

‘I’m dead, then.’ He reaches up a hand to scratch at the back of his neck and winces at the effort it takes. ‘This army doesn’t wait for the injured. I’ll be left on the side of the road. Dead within a week.’

Quietly, he curses again and his face creases up as he tries to hold back his tears.

Jemma stands opposite him, her hands balled into fists and her mind turning. ‘So, don’t go then,’ she blurts out.

Fitz turns to gape at her. ‘What?’

‘Stay.’ She steps forward, one hand extended. ‘Stay here. My parents are healers in our village, you could stay with us…’

He lets out a bitter laugh. ‘What, they’d just take _me_ in? The enemy?’

‘You’re not the enemy,’ Jemma has snapped before she can stop herself.

Fitz raises his eyebrows at her in surprise and she sighs. ‘You’re just…’

 _You’re not_ just _anything_.

‘We’ve done it before,’ she settles for instead. ‘A few times. My parents have no prejudices, nor do most of the people in our village. We’ll look after you. Please.’

Fitz looks at her, and she can see the uncertainty flickering behind the blue of his eyes. She can see the fear too.

‘Please,’ Jemma whispers again. ‘If you go with them, you’ll die.’

Fitz shakes his head slightly.

‘Why should I trust you?’ he whispers.

Jemma bites her lip, as a dozen different ways for her to explain this to him run through her mind.

_Because I dream of you._

_Because in my dreams, I love you and you love me, and I think this might be our second chance, but only if you stay. Only if you don’t leave me and you let me take care of you._

_Because I think I’m still in love with you_.

Jemma shakes her head back at him; now is not the time to tell him about her dreams. Not now.

Glancing down at his side again, she sighs.

‘Because you’re bleeding again.’

 

(In the end, she tells him about her dreams three weeks later while they sit outside the bakery in her village eating freshly baked granary rolls.

He falls very quiet as he chews his roll, his elbows resting on his knees. Then, he swallows his mouthful and simply says ‘alright, then’.

They have walked all the way back to her home together in silence before he speaks again, asking her to wait when she is on the threshold. When she does, he reaches out and takes her by the wrist, turning her into him and kissing her gently.

The kiss feels as easy as breathing.

When he has pulled away, Fitz sighs into her neck.

‘I think I might be in love with you too.’)

 

(When he marries her a month later, Jemma has to wonder if this is the way it is always going to be.)

 

ninety nine (part ii)

 

‘So, what’s his name then?’

‘Benji.’

‘Oh. Do I know him?’

‘No. My dad knows his dad from the country club. We met at a party there, last month. We’ve been texting. He likes tennis, and he plays for the county. He’s taking me to an Italian restaurant, he says.’

‘He sounds like an arse, Jemma.’

‘Fitz!’ She throws the dress she was holding to the floor and rounds on her best friend in exasperation. ‘He does not!’

Fitz is sitting cross legged on her bed and scowling, as she combs through her wardrobe, searching for an appropriate dress to wear tonight.

‘Does too.’

It is May.

They are both fifteen, and he is still not in love with her yet.

But Jemma isn’t worried. After all, it has taken him much longer before.

‘You haven’t even met him,’ she retorts, turning back to her wardrobe and tossing a potential skirt behind her. ‘How can you tell me if he’s an arse?’

‘I just can,’ Fitz says, but his voice is muffled and when Jemma looks behind her she sees that the skirt she threw landed over his face and he hasn’t bothered to remove it yet. ‘I have an excellent inner radar for telling whether a person is an arse or not, and from what you have told me about this Benji, it’s going absolutely nuts. He sounds like an arse, Jem.’

She rolls her eyes and reaches out to tug the skirt off his face. When she does, his large blue eyes are looking up at her, like a reproachful puppy.

‘An _arse_ ,’ Fitz repeats deliberately.

There are times when she thinks he might be falling in love with her. Times like this – when he sulks in her room and complains about the boys showing her attention and glares at them when they talk to her at school – she wonders if it has happened already and she hasn’t noticed yet.

But then he never does anything about it and treats her like he always has, and she shrugs it off instead.

It’ll happen.

It always has before, hasn’t it?

‘How tall is he?’ Fitz demands.

‘A little shorter than I am.’

His chest puffs up ever so slightly. ‘So I’m taller than him?’

‘Well, yes, seeing as you’re taller than me, you’d be taller than him, Fitz.’

‘Great. I’ll beat him up for you, if you like.’

‘I wouldn’t like.’

‘Oh, come on,’ he wheedles. ‘I’ve never been bigger than one of your boyfriends before.’

‘ _No_.’

‘Fine. But you’ll tell me if he does anything to hurt you, though. Cheats on you, tells you that you look fat in that skirt, ditches you for tennis lessons. Treads on your toes, even. Because I could beat him up for you, Jemma. Any time.’

Jemma hides her smile with an eye roll. ‘No, you couldn’t.’

Fitz squares his shoulders. ‘Could too.’

‘Actually, you most likely couldn’t.’ She spins around to him and crosses her arms over her chest with a smirk. ‘He’s also a black-belt at karate.’

Fitz’s body sags in disappointment, and he gives a non-committal grunt in response as he rolls back across her bed and kicks his feet up her wall. ‘In that case, I repeat my earlier judgement, with one adjustment. He sounds like a _complete_ arse.’

Jemma scoffs quietly, before reaching into her jewellery box for the bracelet Fitz had given her for Christmas. Delicate, silver and with decorative charms that looked like swallows dangling from it, it’s her favourite.

When she looks up, Fitz is watching her with a far-away expression on his face.

‘D’you think I should learn karate?’

‘No,’ Jemma says. ‘I don’t.’

‘Because I could. If I wanted to.’

‘I know you could, Fitz.’

She reaches out a hand to ruffle the tufts of his hair on her way out to the bathroom and he bats her away, but there is no force behind the gesture.

Jemma pauses, one hand on the doorway, the other clutching her skirt. ‘Are you staying here, then?’

‘Might as well. My mum’s working tonight, and _your_ mum said she was making shepherd’s pie. Plus, I can hear your dad watching Star Trek downstairs.’

Jemma smiles weakly – Fitz weaving his way into the Simmons’ family home, even when she wasn’t there, is one of the things she is finding more endearing about him in this lifetime. Without even meaning to be, he is a part of the family.

For a moment, she allows herself to consider telling him now. To sit down with him on her bed and explain about all the other lifetimes they have lived together and how she always remembers them but he never does.

She could tell him about how much it hurts, every time she has to watch him treat her like a stranger, sometimes even watch him love other people before he loves her, how many futile, angry tears she has cried over how unfair it is.

Jemma wonders whether if she tells him all that now he would let her leave for her date after all.

She is jolted out of her thoughts by the honk of a car horn outside her window. Fitz twists towards the sound, and then back to look up at her.

‘Sounds like your date is here.’

There will be a time for her to tell him, Jemma decides. Now is just not it.

She goes for her date, leaving Fitz in her living room on her couch eating shepherd’s pie and he is still there when she gets home three hours later.

When he grins at her and asks her how it went, she lies and tells him it was perfectly nice, thank you very much, as she tucks her feet up onto the sofa beside him.

Certainly, she is not going to give him the satisfaction of know that he is right.

Benji _is_ , in fact, a complete arse.

 

thirty eight

 

In this lifetime, she hates him.

And not a petty hate either, the kind of hate the ladies in her society clubs and her mother’s luncheon parties claim to have as they hold their fans up against their faces whilst spitefully discussing the dress of a woman across the room.

No, this time Jemma hates him with all the force of a hurricane and the thunder of a lightning storm, white-hot and blinding, terrifying, hurling screams across the room: _God-bloody-damn-you-Leopold-Fitz_ - _how-can-you-not-remember-me-how-can-you-not-remember-us_?

In public, this can only translate as silent distance, which she keeps as much of between them as she possibly can during parties and society events. She turns her back deliberately on him when he approaches her, and pointedly starts a discussion with somebody else. She takes the furthest seat from him at the table during dinners and she closes her eyes to the creases by his mouth when he smiles, and his awkward charm and the warmth of his heart.

In the end, Fitz learns to hate her too.

But in private, Jemma allows her rage to take on a far more terrible, far more tangible appearance.

In this life, she is an artist, which comes as a surprise to her. She finds herself painting every day and sculpting when she can too. By the time she is thirteen, her parents allow her the whole of the orangery at the bottom of their estate as a studio and Jemma fills it with easels and brushes and clay and paints of every colour of the rainbow.

It does not take her long to acknowledge that whenever she paints, it is always him. Sometimes, it is both of them together or the lives they have led previously – even in landscapes, she sees familiarity in the mountains, the mud, the plumes of smoke over country villages in the distance. But always, _always_ , there is Fitz in her artwork.

Jemma pours herself into her paintings. In every brushstroke she puts her anger, in every canvas she leaves her heartache, mounted on the wall for everyone to see. In the pigments of the paint, she lets out her love, whispering to the crevices in the paper all the tiny, insignificant details of her and Fitz’s past lives, all the things she wishes he could remember.

In almost all her paintings, the paint ends up diluted with tears.

At the end of every day, Jemma stands back from her work and she looks at it. When she looks, she sees her anger, and her heartache and love, and all the small things she would never have enough words to tell him about, not even if they lived side-by-side, day after day, until they lived to be one hundred years old.

At the end of every day, Jemma takes her paintings and she tears them to pieces.

She shreds the papers in her sketchbooks to ribbons and tosses them into the sky like black confetti for a funeral; she rips through her canvases with the heels of her shoe and breaks the wood across her knees until her skin is as purple and bruised as the skies she paints.

She pushes her sculptures, complete with the wisps of his curls and the curve of his eyelashes, out of the window with a scream and watches the shards of clay shatter on the patio below. She hurls her paintbrushes and water jars at the walls and, as she sinks to the ground surrounded by the broken remains of their past lives, Jemma Simmons lets herself howl.

At the end of every day, she sweeps up the fragments of glass and torn shreds of paper calmly and locks the door of the orangery shut behind her before she walks back up to her parents’ house for tea.

 

(In this life, she tells him at the top of a hill in a rainstorm, as their clothes become heavy with raindrops and her tears. He stares at her for what feels like a lifetime in itself before taking three strides over to her and cupping her face in his hands.

She waits, holding her breath as he tips his forehead down to rest on hers, but when he whispers to her it is not the words she has been waiting this whole life to hear. Instead, he is apologising, telling her: _sorry, I’m so sorry_ , over and over again.

He has proposed, she finds out. To a girl they had both met frequently at such occasions as they saw one another. She is pretty enough, kindly, and marrying her will bring great prosperity to both their families.

Really, it is the most fortunate arrangement for them both.

Jemma watches him walk away from her down the hill, his shoulders slumped and his shirt drenched through. In her palm, the key to the orangery digs so hard into her skin that she feels it draw blood.)

 

(The worst part of all this is that she only has herself to blame.)

 

ninety nine (part iii)

 

It is December.

They are twenty-one years old, and (finally) he is in love with her.

For Jemma, it couldn’t have come soon enough.

They are in their last year at university, the university they picked to go to together, after pouring over prospectuses for days – she is studying art history, he is taking French. He first kissed her in the Louvre on a weekend trip to Paris last month, with Antonio Canova’s ‘Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss’ as the backdrop behind them and Jemma thought that it was the most beautiful kiss they had had yet.

But of course, she thinks that every time.

Even now, as they stubble down the hallway in their shared house and into her bedroom, away from the lights and mistletoe of the Christmas party with their hands twined together and their bodies pressed into one another, Jemma cannot help herself think that she was wrong all those times before.

 _This_ time, they will be the most beautiful they have ever been.

‘I love you,’ Fitz tells her as he holds her flat against the back of the door, his beer-addled breath hot against her neck.

They have both been drinking, it is a party after all, but not to such an extent that they do not know what they are doing. Jemma’s mind might be spinning ever so slightly, her world warm and fuzzy around the edges, but she has learnt that things like this, things like Fitz, are much better experienced when she can remember them afterwards. After all, she has to do the remembering for both of them.

‘I know,’ she sighs, and lets him plant a long line of kisses along the curve of her chin and into her hair before she leans forward to kiss his lips. As she pulls back, her teeth graze purposefully on the inside of his mouth and Fitz lets out a little groan.

‘I love you,’ he mumbles as their mouths touch again, speaking through kisses. ‘I love you so much. I love you to the moon. I love you to the moon _and_ back. I love you to the moon, and then to the sun, and then to EGS-zs8-1, which is the galaxy farthest from earth that we can see with a telescope.’ He kisses her again, and it is with such gentle force that Jemma finds it leaves her gasping. ‘And if there’s a galaxy farther than that, then I’ll love you to that too.’

The fizzy wine she has drunk combined with his words make Jemma giggle, giddy with glee. ‘Keep going.’

Silently, she tilts her face up into his and closes her eyes, offering up a prayer to whatever deity floating up among the stars allowed for this to be happening to her. _Thank you_ , she whispers.

‘I will,’ Fitz promises, and his next kiss lifts her off her feet so Jemma feels like she is floating through the galaxies he loves her to. ‘I won’t stop at EGS-zs8-1. I’ll just keep going and going and I’ll never stop.’

 _I love you_ , Jemma thinks but aloud she only suggests: ‘bed?’

Fitz makes an appreciative keening noise with his face still pressed into her neck, and he spins her in a half circle before letting her slide down to the floor.

They stumble backwards towards her narrow, creaking bed together and fall onto it, a beautiful mess of limbs and clothes and hot kisses.

‘I love you,’ Fitz repeats again, sliding his leg between hers and pushing himself up onto his elbow so he can look down on her.

In the light of the streetlamps shining through her thin curtains, Jemma thinks that he glows.

She smiles, and reaches her arms up for him, but suddenly Fitz catches her hands and frowns. Instantly, the fuzz from Jemma’s mind falls away.

‘What…what’s wrong?’

‘You…you don’t say it,’ he says hesitantly. ‘You don’t say ‘I love you’. Not as much as I do anyway, and I know that shouldn’t matter and for the most part it doesn’t, because I know you do. I _like_ saying it to you, but sometimes…it would just be nice, is all. To hear _you_ say it too.’

 _Oh_.

Jemma feels like her heart has grown as heavy as lead inside her chest as she realises how horribly, terribly selfish she has been.

She doesn’t say it as much as he does, he is absolutely right. She has grown so accustomed to her love for him and so assured of it in her own mind after so many lifetimes spent alone with it that she forgets to say it out loud.

It is silly, she knows, but she still needs to hear him say it. She finds herself greedily needing to be assured of his love over and over again, because she has lost it so many times. Every lifetime, she is afraid that it won’t come back to her.

This time, she has been so afraid that she has forgotten. She has forgotten that he doesn’t have the same assurance of her love that she does. He still needs to hear her say it too.

Carefully, Jemma reaches up her fingers to hold onto the sides of Fitz’s head, stroking the slight stubble he has kept ever since she mentioned on the off chance that she quite liked it.

‘I love you,’ she whispers, and finds that tears prick at the corners of her eyes. ‘I love you to…’

_I love you to our first life together._

_I love you to Flodden field._

_I love you to 1813._

_I love you to now, and all our lives in between._

_I’ll love you to our last life together and I’ll never stop_.

Jemma cannot find the words.

Instead, she pushes him gently off her, and Fitz falls onto his back. She moves upwards as he does so, straddling his hips and tucking her feet into his sides.

‘I love you,’ she says simply, and she takes his hands in hers to guide them up to her shirt to pull it over her head. The air is cold on her bare skin but the look of pure wonderment on Fitz’s face as he stares up at her warms Jemma to the very tips of her fingers.

She could tell him now, in this little bedroom at the top of a house filled with students and tinsel. She could tell him, if she wanted.

But Jemma finds, when she reaches behind her back to unfasten the clasp of her purple, lacy bra that she doesn’t want to.

As she leans back down to kiss him again, Fitz’s hands warm and loving on her sides as he helps her, she finds that all the words she had been forming to try and tell him are dimming from her mind. By the time the rest of their clothes are lying in discarded piles on the floor and Jemma’s body is humming with the sweetest, most easy bliss she could ever imagine, the words are gone completely.

That night, none of their past lives exist to Jemma.

The only thing that exists is her and Fitz.

 

sixty three

 

Jemma is running down the road when the bike comes out of nowhere to hit her.

She is coming back from the post office in town for the fifth time this week, desperate to see whether there has been any letters for her. It has been four months since her plea was published in the Sheffield Telegraph on the 8th of March 1942, begging for a Scottish boy with dusty hair and blue eyes to come forward and find her.

It has been four months and still she has had no reply, and now Jemma is getting desperate.

In two weeks, he will turn eighteen.

The bike hits her because she isn’t looking where she is going (the tears blurring her eyes are making that rather hard to do), and the next thing Jemma knows is a yell, the screech of rusty breaks and a sharp pain in her side, and suddenly she is lying winded on her back on the road staring up at the clouds.

‘Oh, God.’ There is a clatter from her side as the bike drops to the tarmac and a figure appears over her, blocking out the sun. ‘Oh, God, oh, God. Are you alright?’

‘F-fine,’ Jemma gasps out, but the truth is, she really isn’t. Not when it’s Fitz bending over her for the first time this lifetime.

‘Are you sure? I hit you so hard, I thought…I just didn’t see you, I wasn’t thinking about where I was going…’ He crouches down and all his features shift into focus. His hands hover over her. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’

‘It’s alright.’ Tentatively, Jemma sits up, waving Fitz away when he tries to help her. She can’t quite face the familiarity of his touch, not right now. ‘I’m fine, really.’

And she will be, once she gets her breath back and the shock wears off. After months of frantic searching, who would have thought this would be how she found him again?

Fitz looks almost exactly as he always does at almost eighteen: not quite grown into his body yet, still slightly baby-faced, like a deer bridging between being a fawn and a stag. The only exception is a small scar down the left side of his nose and Jemma knows that if they had a little more time she would find out how he had gotten it. Unfortunately, they do not have the time.

‘You should at least let me walk you home.’ He is watching her with concern and Jemma feels a pang in her chest. ‘In case, y’know, you’re not alright and you faint or something before you get there…’

Jemma is about to open her mouth to tell him she would like that, when the sky above them is split open with an ear-piercing wail and her heart clenches.

Fitz freezes too, his mouth parted in shock.

‘Air raid,’ Jemma breathes.

‘No,’ he mumbles. ‘Oh, no.’

Jemma’s mind starts to reel; they are about fifteen minutes from her house, with its corrugated steel Anderson shelter, too far to run before the bombs started to drop. Already, she can see the planes emerging from the clouds in the distance.

Quickly, she looks around the street. Her way home from the post office follows a neighbourhood that was bombed a few weeks ago and directly opposite them is a house that was razed practically to the ground. All that is left standing is some rubble, and the remains of a staircase. Inside her mind, the pieces click together.

‘There.’ Jemma raises a trembling finger to the house, and Fitz glances over his shoulder. ‘They should have a basement we can hide in. This neighbourhood has already been bombed to bits, so there’s a chance they won’t…that they’ll…’

She trails off, but Fitz nods, understanding her perfectly. He places an arm around her back to help her stand and then lets her lean on his shoulder all the way to the house, as Jemma finds that her legs are still unstable underneath her.

They have only just shut the basement door when the bombs start to fall.

The first falls maybe four miles away, but they hear it even so and Jemma feels Fitz’s shoulder tense next to hers, and she has to clench her hands into fists to stop herself from reaching out to take his hand and comfort him.

‘This was,’ he says after a few minutes, ‘a good idea. Really good. You probably saved my life, and after I nearly killed you as well.’

Jemma snorts quietly. ‘You didn’t nearly kill me. You hit me with your bike.’

‘It’s a pretty big bike.’

Another bomb drops, and it sounds closer.

‘I’m sorry, again,’ Fitz says. ‘About hitting you. I wasn’t thinking about where I was going, I was…’

Jemma leans forward. She can’t make out his face in the dark. ‘What were you thinking about?’ she asks softly.

‘I was coming back from the registry office. I turn eighteen in two weeks,’ he shifts against the wall uncomfortably, ‘and in three I leave for duty. I signed up today.’

It feels like the air has been knocked out of Jemma’s lungs.

She had known to expect this; she knew how stubborn he was, how deeply his hero complex ran through his veins. She had known he would sign up to fight, but she hadn’t realised how much hearing it would still hurt.

‘What regiment?’ she manages to ask after a moment.

‘Not a regiment. A squadron. I’m going into the RAF. To be a pilot.’

So, Jemma thinks dully, it will not be an enemy bullet that takes him from her this time. Instead, it will be the merciless expanse of the sky.

There is an explosion, even closer now, maybe only two miles away, and through the cracks in the floorboards above them Jemma sees a light bloom before dimming.

‘That’s very brave,’ she whispers.

‘S’not brave. It’s what we have to do.’

‘That doesn’t make it any less brave.’

They hear another bomb, and this time the walls of the basement shake. Jemma jumps and feels a hand reach out to grip her own tightly, pumping it once and then twice.

‘It’s alright,’ Fitz whispers to her as the walls stop trembling, then he says as lightly as he can: ‘of course, it’ll only be brave if I get there. Not much bravery in signing up and never getting to fly, eh?’

Jemma exhales in a silent laugh through her nose.

‘I’m Fitz, by the way.’

‘Jemma.’

‘Nice to meet you, Jemma.’

 _Trust me_ , she thinks wearily. _You don’t know the half of it_.

It occurs to her that they might not make it out of here. Another bomb drops and for all the noise it makes it could have been right on top of them. In her lap, Fitz squeezes her hand tighter and she can’t tell whether it’s to reassure him or her.

‘Fitz,’ she gasps out. ‘I have to tell you something.’

‘Oh yeah?’ His voice quivers and that is how she knows he is terrified. ‘No time like the present.’

Jemma swallows; her throat is slick with dust.

‘I…I know you. Not from this life, but from others. We’ve…we’ve met before. In sixty two other lives, and I know it sounds absolutely _nuts_ but it’s true, only you can’t remember them. You never can. But I do. I…I remember everything.’

In the heated dark of the basement, the words are suffocating, as is the heavy silence from Fitz that follows them.

‘So…in these lives,’ he says, his voice catching on the words, ‘do we…? What are we…?’

He is asking, Jemma realises, whether they love each other.

‘We’re together,’ she whispers. ‘Always.’

Fitz exhales shakily, and his hold on her hand slackens. The tightness in Jemma’s throat now has nothing to do with the dust in the room.

‘Do you believe it?’ she asks after a few minutes of silence.

‘I don’t…know if I believe _that_ ,’ he says.

Then, he turns to her and his face is illuminated by the sudden flare of another bomb overhead but this time neither of them flinch.

‘But I believe _you_.’

It is only when his hand tightens on hers again that Jemma allows herself to let out her breath.

They sit there together, holding hands in the dark while the bombs hail down around them like the sky is falling to the earth. Jemma closes her eyes and waits for the end to come.

But it doesn’t.

 

(Instead, it comes ten months later, when his mother knocks on her door and Jemma opens it to see tear-stained cheeks and a crumbled telegram staring back at her.

She tears away from her and out of the front door, all the way back to that house and that basement, where they had sat for hours waiting for the last of the bombs to fall.

She tumbles to the ground, feeling the dust and rubble crumble beneath her fingertips where once his hands held her instead. Jemma curls herself into a ball, feeling too empty even for tears and she listens to the sky.

Maybe, if she is lucky enough, the bombers will come back and the world will go black and then she will be with him again.)

 

(She waits until it grows dark before she walks home alone, shivering in the cold.)

 

ninety nine (part iv)

 

‘You’re so beautiful.’

These are the first words she hears as she drifts back into consciousness, her mind fuzzy with painkillers and light.

‘You are so, so beautiful. You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my whole life. You are _so_ beautiful…’

She might have been a little hurt to hear her husband telling this to anyone but herself, had the person he was crooning them to not been their new-born daughter, cradled in his arms.

It is February.

They are thirty-four years old, and, lying in a hospital bed in the maternity ward, Jemma FitzSimmons is blissfully content.

Fitz hasn’t noticed she is awake yet so she lies still, watching him as he sits in a chair by her bed with a bundle of pink blankets held in his arms. Over the top, she can just make out a button nose and the rise of two chubby cheeks. Their daughter.

Jemma listens as Fitz continues to whisper, the curve of his fingernail stroking their baby’s face, feeling her heart grow larger with every word he promises to her.

But when the tiny rosebud mouth buried under the blankets opens to give a thin, reedy cry and Fitz’s face falls, she leans up on one elbow.

‘Here, give her to me.’

The relief on Fitz’s face is almost comic. ‘You’re awake.’

Jemma nods and shifts herself up against the pillows so that Fitz can rest their daughter in her arms.

She is heavier than Jemma thought she might be, but so delicate and feather soft that she cannot help marvelling at her.

‘Hello, beautiful,’ she murmurs.

Fitz does not return to his chair but sits on the edge of her bed instead. ‘She looks like you,’ he says.

Jemma hums in mild appreciation. They have had children before, in several past lives, but the wonder of it never fails to sweep her away. She does not tell him that, given time, their daughter will come to resemble him more than her, but that she will retain her mother’s warm brown eyes her whole life long.

For a moment, several more brown-eyed, childish faces flit through Jemma’s mind and she has to bite her tongue to keep her from crying out loud. Now is not the time to mourn for the children she will never see again, she tells herself fiercely. Not when there is one snuggling into her chest who still needs her.

‘She needs a name,’ Jemma mumbles. The crying had stifled almost the instant the baby was placed in her arms; now, she is only snuffling gently.

‘Mmm.’ She looks up to see Fitz smiling down at them both, his face alight with love. ‘But tomorrow, though. Here, let me put her back in her cot.’

Reluctantly, Jemma lets him ease their daughter out of her arms and back down into the hospital issue cot beside them. She misses the feel of the baby beside her, but the way her eyelids are dropping tell her that he has the right idea.

She leans forward to let Fitz slide onto the bed behind her and once he is on, he carefully pulls her down so she can use his chest as a pillow, feeling his heartbeat behind her head.

Jemma smiles, and lifts his arm up and across her so she can hug it tight to herself. ‘I love you,’ she says.

Now would be the perfect time to tell him. They are both tired, happy and as in love with each other as they will ever be. She could reach up right now and whisper to him all the parts of their past lives she can remember, one by one, until he has a mismatched kaleidoscope image of them and she has someone to share them with again. 

Now. She could tell him now.

Fitz bends his face forward and kisses her hair. ‘Love you too,’ he mumbles.

He continues to stroke her hair, one eye on their new-born in the cot, until Jemma feels her eyes grow too heavy to hold up anymore and, slowly, she falls back asleep.

 

eighty-one

 

In her eighty-first life, Jemma tries to make sense of it all.

Soulmates, she thinks. Two people so psychically linked that they are destined to be together, no matter the cost, no matter the distance.

Parallel universes. Maybe she is stuck between them, always flickering through hundreds of lives, destined to meet hundreds of versions of him.

On her good days, she likes to think about the first law of thermodynamics. That the energy between their particles in their past lives was so great that when they both died it went on to give them new lives, in the hope that they would be good ones.

On her bad days, Jemma thinks that the universe is playing a joke on her, that none of this is real at all. Maybe she has had an accident and all her lives have been violent hallucinations as doctors struggle to revive her body. Maybe the real Fitz is waiting for her in some hospital somewhere, wringing his hands out in worry. On her very worst days, Jemma wonders whether he is real at all. Maybe it’s all a sick, sick joke.

Atoms, she thinks, pulled apart from the same celestial implosion and scattered across the universe over thousands of years, only to end up in her and Fitz. Atoms torn apart by disaster but still aching to pull back together into one being.

Jemma thinks of dozens of possible explanations for what is happening between them, and she reasons that the odds of her finding the correct one this time around are pretty good.

This time around, they are both rocket scientists, after all.

Her mind works on her theories silently, while her hands monitor the vitals of men in space suits and the forces of their gravitational pulls, while Fitz tinkers in the room next door with hatches to air locks and safety tethers. She can see him through the glass panel they had installed in the wall between their twin labs two years ago, so it feels like they are working in the same one. When he glances up to see her watching him, he gives her a wry smile that reaches all the way to his eyes and her heart.

It is that smile that sent butterflies fluttering in Jemma’s stomach and spurs her on, determinedly, to find her next theory.

Maybe, she thinks, if she has found the right one when she tells him in this life then he will remember it in the next.

On the 21st of July 1969, at four minutes to three in the morning, they are both up in the control room at NASA to hear the shuttle and the suits they helped get to space set foot on the moon.

Fitz turns to her in delight and lifts her up, only to spin her around and around in delighted circles to a backdrop of cheers and crackles down the interface of the sounds of the universe. He presses an exuberant kiss to her lips while she is still in midair, and laughing so hard her chest hurts.

It is only then that Jemma realises all her attempts at theorising are futile.

Some things in life are just truly inexplicable.

 

(In this life, she tells him half an hour later in a janitor’s closet opposite their labs, with the sound of space still dizzying in her ears.)

 

(He doesn’t say anything at all this time. He only reaches out to take her across his lap and kiss her again.)

 

ninety nine (part v)

 

She is staring out of the window when he comes into the room, two mugs of tea in his hand. Rain splatters the window sill, dripping off the leaves of the trees over their house as the wind whips the branches against the glass.

It is November.

They are seventy-five years old, and Jemma is forgetting.

At first, it is little things.

She forgets things that do not matter, like whether they already have milk when she goes to the supermarket. They _did_ have milk, but Fitz tells her he’s glad she got it anyway. With the extra milk, they make cauliflower cheese for dinner.

Then, she starts forgetting things that _do_ matter. She forgets that she turned the stove on in the kitchen and goes to do the gardening. When Fitz comes home to the fire department hosing down his front room, he persuades her that it’s time to get some help.

When they go to the hospital, they come home with a diagnosis. _Alzheimer's disease_.

Fitz sits with her for hours afterwards, slowly rubbing the skin of her hand in small circles.

Now, she is starting to forget the thing that matters the most.

‘Jemma.’

It is his voice that calls her back to the present, pressing the warmth of the mug into her hand with a grin. It is a grin that lifts the corners of his mouth and lights up his eyes without really meaning to.

As she settles back in her armchair with the mug resting in her lap, Jemma cannot help but smile too.

‘Thank you,’ she says, and she means it.

Fitz shrugs, and winks at her as he sits in his chair opposite hers. Together, they turn back to the window.

She wanted to say something to him, Jemma thinks. There was something she has been meaning to say for _weeks_ now, she was thinking about it just before he walked into the room.

It was something important.

But it is gone now, the wisp of a memory pulled from her brain like a thread of silk from a scarf, gone like the memory of what she had for breakfast, or the name of her daughter’s stuffed monkey in her crib. But unlike these things, Fitz cannot tell her what she wanted to tell him.

It is only when Fitz pushes his chair back abruptly, spilling his tea onto the floor, that Jemma realises that the droplets of water on the inside of the window do not, in fact, mean that there is a leak in the ceiling. She is crying.

‘Jemma?’ He kneels down beside her, and she knows that she ought to chide him and remind him about his bad knee, but she also knows that he wouldn’t listen to her anyway. ‘Jemma, what’s wrong?’

He reaches up to cup her face, brushing away the tears on her cheek as he did so. Jemma turns into his hand, and looks down at him, hoping that some familiarity would jog her memory, and she will remember what it was she had wanted to tell him.

Jemma searches his face, the face she loves more than anything in the world. There are memories etched in every crease of his skin, memories that she cannot grasp hold of anymore. The concern in his eyes brings the tears back to her own with a gasp.

‘I can’t remember,’ she tells him, and it comes out in a whimper.

Fitz stands quickly and takes her into his arms before she starts to cry again, rocking her back and forth as he plants kiss after kiss on her forehead.

‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘It’s okay. I do.’ He tilts her head towards him and kisses her, tenderly, on the lips.

‘I’ll remember for both of us.’

 

(She dies six months later, with him by her side, and her death is quiet. There are no howling thunderstorms in the sky, no avalanche in the mountains, no fire-blazing comets falling from the sky. The planets stay in orbit.

They bury her in the churchyard and lay a bunch of pink tulips on the gravestone. Fitz stands beside it, one hand resting on the marble as the rest of the mourners fall away. It is only when their daughter comes up and takes his hand that he allows himself to leave her.)

 

(In this lifetime, she doesn’t tell him.)

 

 

 

 

 

one hundred

 

Leopold Fitz has lived one hundred lives.

This has been something he has known for as long as he can remember, with a grim certainty and a calm acceptance. There was no sudden realisation as a child, no break in his brain as an adult that allowed all the memories to come flooding to the surface and make him gasp for air. They’d just always been there.

They are not fragments of memories either; they are rich, full and complete. He remembers each of them in turn at night, carefully ticking them off in his head until he has remembered all one hundred lives.

He has to do this, he thinks to himself. He promised her he would.

               

The other thing Fitz knows is that, in this lifetime, he is alone. Jemma Simmons does not exist.

 

He cannot explain quite how he knows this, just that he does. It is like his past lives, a piece of information he has known in his heart since the day he was born.

His mother always told him that he was a very grizzly baby. Maybe, Fitz thinks bitterly, that was because he was already carrying centuries of hurt in his heart.

As he grows older, he starts to write. He finds that it is easier to scratch out the details of he and Jemma’s lives together on paper than it is to keep them inside his head, and within a few years he has written all ninety nine of them and the papers stack up inside his flat. On every surface he finds a lifetime.

His friends pressure him to send the manuscripts to a publisher, claiming that they will be a sensation, and in the end Fitz begrudgingly agrees, if only for the money. In some respects, he feels almost possessive over them – why should he have to share their lives with the world? – but the prospect of being able to provide a comfortable existence for his mother wins out.

His friends are right; his novels _do_ become a sensation, a phenomenon even. There is something hypnotising, the critics claim, about the way he is able to capture the love between his characters with his words. It is transfixing, they say.

There is pressure, he knows, for him to write a 100th novel to round the number up, for the novelty of it. But Fitz refuses. What is the point in writing about this life when it is just him living it?

 

There is no love story worth telling about a man and his memories.

 

 

 

 

one hundred and one

 

‘Fitz.’

‘Simmons.’

‘I know. I mean, I know who you are. I’ve heard people talking about you.’

‘Oh. Well, in that case, I’ve heard people talk about you too.’

               

There is something familiar about this boy, Jemma thinks. She has never noticed it before, in all the weeks she has spent glaring at him from the other side of the lab, glowering at his back as he attempts to one up her in everything she does.

But now he is standing next to her she wonders how she has never recognised the way his eyes crease up when he smiles, or the curve of his shoulders, or the sandy tufts of his hair. There is something familiar about him, like the last echoes of a dream in the morning before it fades forever.

She blinks, and suddenly the feeling passes.

 

‘We’ve never worked before, have we?’

‘No. I don’t think so, at least. I think I would have remembered it.’

‘Yeah, me too. Seeing as we’re both the youngest in the class…’

‘Well, technically, I’m the youngest. You are twenty three days older than me, just for the record.’

‘…How do you know _that_?’

 

There is something familiar about this girl. Fitz can’t quite place his finger on it. He has spent the past few weeks ignoring her almost completely, terrified that the first time he speaks to her he will make a mistake. He cannot quite tell how he knows this, but something tells him they are meant to be friends. Maybe it is written in the stars.

He has spent so long avoiding her that now, as she tries to look down her nose at him (a tall feat, seeing as she is a few inches shorter than him), he finds he is looking at her properly for the first time. She has a smattering of pale freckles across her face, and her hair curls up at the tips. Her eyes are brown, and laced with hazel, and he finds himself feeling an empty sadness when he looks into them, as if he is remembering something he had once lost.

She reminds him of a novel he read long ago, or maybe a painting. She is an echo of these things.

Then, suddenly, the echo is gone.

 

‘Well…You have to pick up on these things, don’t you? When there’s only one other person your age in the class.’

‘Oh. I suppose you do.’

 

 Nothing is familiar, they think.

               

And yet everything is.

 

 _I can’t let this go_ , Fitz thinks and he takes a deep breath.

 

‘Look, I feel like we might have gotten off on the wrong foot here, yeah? And if we’re going to have to work together this week…and maybe after that…what do you say we just…start again?’

               

Jemma tilts her head to one side and considers.

She has never met this boy before and yet there is something so familiar about him that it feels like she has walked into a new house for the first time and found it filled with her own furniture. She feels like she would be able to find her way around him, even in the dark.

Almost instantly, he feels like home.

               

There is a theory, published by an anonymous astrobiologist in the 1970s, which suggests that some people are drawn together because their atoms were once part of the same astronomic body. It suggests that these people are attracted to one another because even now, thousands of years later, their atoms still retain the memory of that past life and are seeking each other out.

It is a nice theory, Jemma thinks. Utterly inconceivable, and with no research to support it, but still nice.

 

Jemma smiles at Fitz and automatically he smiles back. Jemma does not believe in the theory, but if someone had told her in that moment that there was a bond between their atoms that had been kept alive for thousands of years, she would have had a hard time disbelieving them.

‘I’d like that,’ she says softly.

 

‘I’d like that a lot.’

 

 


End file.
